EMC doubles density of storage systems

EMC has doubled the storage density of its mid-range storage systems

EMC has announced a new higher-density configuration of its Clariion CX4 midrange storage array and Celerra network-attached storage (NAS) gateway device, claiming to offer twice the capacity of previous systems in half the floor space.

The mid-range storage systems, which now can house twice the number of hard disk drives in half the frame space, will also support lower-power 2TB SATA drives, compared to the 1TB drives supported by earlier systems.

The higher-density Clariion can be configured with the 2TB SATA drives as well as high-performance enterprise solid-state drives (SSDs). The Clariion uses power efficiency technology such as disk spin down and EMC fully automated storage tiering (FAST) to allow for automated data migration between internal disks. Disk spin down puts drives into sleep mode when they're not in use, yielding a 65 percent power savings compared to always-on SATA drives, according to Ruya Atac-Barrett, director of Clariion product marketing at EMC.

The Celerra NAS gateway uses the Clariion frame as its back-end.

Atac-Barrett said the new 2TB 5,400-rpm SATA drives also consume 60 percent less power than the previous 1TB 7,200-rpm SATA drives.

A Clariion array can support up to 480 drives, or 960TB of raw capacity. A previous Clariion model array would have taken up six data centre floor tiles, while the new model takes up only three.

The higher density is achieved through a re-architecture of the frame, making it five inches deeper and so that two disk drive trays now fit front to back.

"It's a four-fold increase in what you can do in a single system's capacity, or a two-fold capacity increase in half the footprint," Atac-Barrett said.

A complete Clariion array, ready to run with standard 1TB SATA drives, starts at around $85,000.